Alameda in History: The South Pacific Coast Railroad’s lost ferries

Last month we met Charles Minturn and A. A. Cohen and leaned the roles their ferry boats played in our history. In this month’s story, we’ll ride the South Pacific Coast Railroad’s ferry boats — Newark, Garden City, Bay City and Encinal. We’ll also learn the interesting fates of two of these ferries.

When James Fair and Alfred Davis, owners of the narrow-gauge South Pacific Coast Railroad, wanted steam-driven ferry boats to carry their passengers across the bay to San Francisco they turned to San Francisco boat builder William Edwin Collyer. Collyer — a Connecticut native whose family had long-established shipbuilding businesses in New York City — set to work at his Potrero Point shipyard near modern-day Pier 70. Collyer and his skilled workmen built the Newark, and later, the Bay City and Garden City, for Fair and Davis.

Collyer launched the Newark on April 18, 1877. The steamer first carried passengers from Dumbarton Point, near the eastern footing of the modern-day Dumbarton Bridge. Fair and Davis knew the hour-long trip aboard the Newark from Dumbarton Point to San Francisco would not suit their customers, and had already formed the Bay & Coast Railroad to lay tracks to Alameda.

By the time South Pacific Coast had completed its wharves on Alameda’s West End, in the summer of 1879, Collyer had launched the Bay City and the Garden City. The Bay City left Collyer’s shipways on May 18, 1878; the Garden City went into service a little more than a year later, on June 20, 1879.